When sorting a collection of articles is desired, a sorting conveyor can be used to accomplish the task. A sorting conveyor is a circular, rectangular, or other shape endless chain or line having associated with it one or more loading stations where articles to be sorted are placed onto the conveyor and one or more drop stations where articles are deposited into sorted groups.
Loading the sorting conveyor with articles to be sorted involves moving the conveyor past a loading station. At the loading station, such articles to be sorted (the "unsorted sequence") are placed, one by one, onto the sorting conveyor at discrete points along its length. The sorting conveyor can be loaded with articles in any unsorted order.
The sorting of articles is accomplished by moving the loaded conveyor past a drop station which selects certain articles from the conveyor in a specified order. In this way, an unsorted sequence of articles loaded on the sorting conveyor can be converted into a sorted sequence at one or more drop stations.
In order to sort a collection of unsorted articles using a sorting conveyor, it is necessary to determine the identity of each article. Furthermore, unsorted articles must be loaded onto the sorting conveyor and their identities must be associated with locations on the sorting conveyor.
Identifying and loading each article in an unsorted sequence of articles can be a manual-labor intensive task. Determining and recording an article's identification may be performed by one or more operators by hand. Once identified, each article may be loaded by hand in some fashion onto the sorting conveyor. These manual labor-intensive aspects of identifying and loading articles create a bottle-neck, slowing the overall process undesirably.